Vacate

vacate
verb, transitive. To leave a place that one previously occupied. To give up a position or office.

The orchestra had just begun the movement he loved in the Dvorák symphony when he felt his phone vibrate against his chest. With a yearning regret that it never summoned him when he would welcome an interruption, he vacated his folding chair, squeezed Marcia’s hand, and hurried up the aisle to the grove of trees behind the amphitheatre, where he could talk without disturbing anyone else’s enjoyment of the music. It was Frey, the intern who had been assigned to watch the aneurysm patient come out from under anaesthesia. “Something’s wrong, sir,” the young man said. “He says he can’t hear and he’s panicking. An anguish more powerful than anything the lovely distant music could evoke seized him and he told Frey he would get there as soon as possible. He ended the call, turned his back to the orchestra and the crowd, and walked through darkness to his car. Long practice meant Marcia would understand when he didn’t return to his seat at her side. That was the reason the two of them always went out in separate cars.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.